Fidel’s Heir

The influence of Hugo Chávez.

Venezuela’s oil money has brought better living standards for the country’s poorest citizens. It has also given Chávez the means to buy influence with his neighbors, usually at the expense of the United States. Photograph by Chris Anderson.Credit MAGNUM

A few years ago, when Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, said that he wanted a new jet to replace the nearly thirty-year-old Boeing bequeathed to him by his predecessor, his critics raised an outcry. But Chávez went ahead with his plans. His new plane, which cost sixty-five million dollars, is a gleaming white Airbus A-319, with a white leather interior, seating for sixty passengers, and a private compartment. The folding seat-back trays have gold-colored hinges, and there is plenty of legroom.

Chávez has spent more than a year altogether on trips abroad since taking office, in February, 1999, and so the jet is a kind of second home. His seat bears an embossed leather Presidential seal. Paintings of nineteenth-century Latin-American independence heroes hang on the walls, including a prominent one of Simón Bolívar, known as El Libertador. Bolívar led military campaigns to free large parts of South America from Spanish rule, and in 1819 he helped create a vast nation called Gran Colombia, which encompassed the present-day republics of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama. But political rivalries and internecine warfare frustrated Bolívar’s dream of a United States of South America, and Gran Colombia fell apart soon after his death, in 1830.

Bolívar is Chávez’s political muse; Chávez quotes and invokes him constantly, and is unabashed about his desire to resuscitate Bolívar’s dream of a united Latin America. In his first year in office, Chávez held a successful referendum to draft a new constitution, which officially renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. More remarkably, he has adopted Fidel Castro as his contemporary role model and socialism as his political ideal, and, a decade and a half after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is leading a left-wing revival across Latin America. Chávez’s hemispheric ambitions have made him one of the most compelling, audacious, and polarizing figures in the world—one of a number of post-Cold War leaders trying to form regional power blocs. A generation ago, Castro sought to undermine United States authority by supporting armed guerrilla forces; Chávez has pursued that goal mainly by using money—thanks, in large measure, to U.S. oil purchases. Venezuela is the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the U. S., providing around a million barrels a day, and its proved oil reserves are among the world’s largest.

One recent Sunday, I flew with Chávez to La Faja del Orinoco, an oil-rich belt of land in eastern Venezuela. In May, 2007, Chávez ordered the nationalization of pumping and refining facilities in La Faja owned by foreign oil companies. The move was one of a series of measures that Chávez had taken to increase Venezuela’s share of oil revenues, including increases in royalty payments from 16.6 per cent to 33.3 per cent, and its ownership stake from around forty to at least sixty per cent. (As recently as 2004, these companies were paying royalties of one per cent of the oil’s value.) Most of the oil companies, including Chevron and B.P., agreed to the terms; ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil did not, and pulled out.

ExxonMobil had been pumping as many as a hundred and twenty thousand barrels a day out of La Faja. Seeking compensation, the company secured injunctions from judges in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands that froze up to twelve billion dollars in overseas assets of Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or P.D.V.S.A. Chávez, decrying “imperialist aggression,” threatened to cut off all oil sales to the United States. Analysts estimate that if he should ever make good on that threat the price, which has already risen vertiginously, would spiral even farther upward. (A London court later overturned the British injunction, in what was seen as a major victory for Chávez, but the legal fight continues. ExxonMobil will not say publicly how much it asked for, except that the sum is “multiple billions of dollars.”)

On the plane to La Faja were several of Chávez’s ministers and aides, along with a dozen or so bodyguards and three Cuban doctors, who travel with him everywhere. Just after boarding, Chávez pushed through the curtains from his compartment to the main cabin and greeted everyone. He joked that the Cuban doctors must be guerrillas on an “internationalist mission.” Halfway through the hour-long flight, I joined Chávez in his compartment. Chávez, who is about five feet seven, is a youthful-looking fifty-three, and has a thick neck and chest. He introduced me to General Gustavo Rangel, his Defense Minister, and René Vargas, Ecuador’s Ambassador to Venezuela.

Chávez began our conversation by asking, “Tell us, why didn’t Saddam put up more of a fight when the Yankees invaded?” Before I could reply, General Rangel said that the Americans had successfully degraded Iraq’s air-defense system in the run-up to the war. Chávez looked at me for confirmation, and when I agreed he smiled, and said that, just in case the Americans were thinking of doing anything similar to Venezuela, he had bought an air-defense system from Belarus. (In the past four years, Venezuela has spent four billion dollars on foreign arms purchases, mostly from Russia.) The Belarusian system probably wasn’t the most sophisticated in the world, Chávez said, but it was what Venezuela could get: “We do what we can to defend ourselves.”

Chávez campaigned for the Presidency, in 1998, with promises to bring radical change, but, for a time after he won, it was unclear whether he could deliver much more than symbolism and oratory. When he took office, oil was at a mere ten dollars a barrel, and his first government budget was seven billion dollars; last year, as oil approached a hundred dollars a barrel (by last week, it was a hundred and thirty-six dollars), the budget rose to fifty-four billion. The oil money has allowed Chávez to triple spending on social programs. Even though many of these “missions,” as they’re known, have foundered or have proved inadequate, the volume of revenues has meant an improvement in living standards for the country’s poorest citizens, who are, unsurprisingly, Chávez’s strongest supporters. It has also given him the means to buy influence with his neighbors, usually at the expense of the United States.

Chávez’s relationship with the United States, which was strained from the start, became openly hostile after a short-lived military coup, in 2002, that seemed to have the blessing of the Bush Administration. Chávez discontinued long-standing military ties and ended Venezuela’s coöperation with the Drug Enforcement Administration, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, before he left office, compared Chávez to Adolf Hitler. In 2006, the State Department placed Venezuela on a list of nations that it described as “uncoöperative” in the war on terror.

Despite the harsh language, unofficial U.S. policy in the past few years has generally been to ignore Chávez, in order to avoid being drawn into a confrontation. This reflects a broader disengagement from the region during the Bush Administration. Since 2001, the United States has been distracted from Latin America by the war on terror and by Iraq, and that has given Chávez room to operate. Venezuela outspends the United States in foreign aid to the rest of Latin America by a factor of at least five. Last year, U.S. aid amounted to $1.6 billion, a third of which went to Colombia, mainly to fund Plan Colombia, a drug-eradication program administered by the U.S. security contractor DynCorp. Chávez, meanwhile, pledged $8.8 billion for the region. This included subsidized oil for Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia; the purchase of public debt in Argentina; and development projects in Haiti. (Chávez has, in addition, provided discounted heating oil to poor Americans through Citgo, the Venzuelan state oil company’s U.S. subsidiary.)

There is also evidence that Chávez has fostered a relationship with the Colombian Marxist guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC. The FARC operates along Venezuela’s border with Colombia and holds hundreds of hostages—civilians, soldiers, and politicians—in secret camps. Chávez has, at times, publicly distanced himself from the FARC, most recently last week, but the group’s espousal of Bolivarian ideals, and its strategic position, appears to have tempted him into seeing the organization as a means, if only by proxy, of confronting the U.S.; Colombia is one of America’s closest allies in the region.

The present in Latin America may be analogous to the nineteen-sixties, when the U.S. was mired in Vietnam and deeply unpopular internationally, and Fidel Castro and Che Guevara (another hero of Chávez’s) saw an opportunity to foment guerrilla insurgencies elsewhere—“one, two, three, many Vietnams,” as Che said—by which U.S. strength could be sapped.

Cris Arcos, who was, until recently, President Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for International Affairs, told me he feared that the moment had passed for the U.S. to do much to contain Chávez. “The problem with the war on terror is that the Pentagon can’t engage anywhere else—it’s tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Arcos said. “Our foreign policy is all about China and the war on terror, so where does that leave Latin America?”

In Latin America, Arcos said, “the political left has lost its fear of the gringos and the right has lost its respect for the U.S. Why? Ironically, because both expected the U.S. to smash the left, especially now that it is the sole superpower.” He continued, “The U.S. predictably considers Chávez to be annoying and crude, and thinks that he behaves inappropriately for a head of state. His cavorting with Iranians and other pariahs is alarming to the U.S., yet it’s not taken seriously by his South American neighbors.” Their tolerance for Chávez, he said, was “evidence of the U.S.’s eroding influence in the region.”

Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico, first met Chávez in 1999, when, as President Clinton’s Energy Secretary, he represented the United States at Chávez’s inauguration. (He brought him a baseball glove as a swearing-in gift.) Richardson told me, “I am concerned that, because of our policy to isolate Chávez, we may have created a vacuum in Latin America, where he already outvotes us on certain issues. I am not saying that this means we have to go along with him, but there may be ways we can establish a working relationship with him. Isolating him is not in our interest.” Richardson said, “I question whether we would be wise to brand Chávez a state sponsor of terror”—a move that the Administration has considered—“because of our energy needs, and our energy relationship with Venezuela.”

The old ExxonMobil station in La Faja was immaculate, all swept gravel and pristinely painted structures. Chávez, who has a regular live Sunday television show, “Aló Presidente,” planned to broadcast from the facility that day.

It was humid but pleasant. An advance team had set up several hundred folding chairs outside the refining station, and a plank floor had been laid down as a stage, with a desk for Chávez, furnished with maps, notepads, and books (including a Spanish edition of Joseph Stiglitz’s “The Roaring Nineties”). Young aides in red T-shirts emblazoned with Chávez’s image and the words “Democracia en Revolución” (“Democracy Within Revolution”) and matching red baseball caps dispensed coffee and bottles of water. Chávez was dressed in a red guayabera and black jeans. His bodyguards and many of his ministers wore similar red guayaberas.

By the time Chávez sat down at the desk, he had been on the air for more than an hour, walking through the facility, followed by cameramen, with his daughter María Gabriela. She is a wide-faced young woman with a toothy smile. As they made their way, he explained what they were seeing, for the benefit of the television audience. Periodically, he stopped to hug or kiss her. She, her sister, Rosa Virginia, and a brother, Hugo Rafael, all in their twenties, are Chávez’s children with his first wife, Nancy Colmenares, whom he divorced in the early nineties. Chávez also has a ten-year-old daughter, Rosinés, with his second wife, Marisabel Rodríguez. Rodríguez left him in 2002, and has since married a tennis instructor. Recently, she has begun speaking out publicly against Chávez, accusing him of being obsessed with power, and hinting that she would like to run for the Presidency herself.

Sitting at the desk, Chávez began with a long pep talk for his supporters. When the camera cut away for a short, sharply critical film about ExxonMobil—it opened with a montage of images of Hitler, oil spills, and John D. Rockefeller—an aide held up a large white screen to shield Chávez while a young woman applied powder to his face. Another aide poured him espresso from a thermos, which he carried in a black leather briefcase.

Back on the air, Chávez spoke scornfully of the students known as los chamos (“the kids”), who, in demonstrations last year, rallied considerable public opposition to him. Some of the leaders of los chamos have expressed interest in running against Chávez’s candidates in mayoral and gubernatorial elections scheduled for November; Chávez called out to those who might “throw themselves” into the race, “Go ahead, jump!” He then added, “Better put on parachutes.”

Chávez has a gospel preacher’s deftness with language and an actor’s ability to evoke emotions. Within a single soliloquy, he comes up with rhymes, breaks into song, riffs on his own words, gets angry, cracks jokes, and loops back to where he started. His speeches can be highly entertaining, but it is sometimes difficult to know if he means what he says or has simply been carried away by his own oratory. A couple of years ago, at the United Nations General Assembly, he announced that he smelled “sulfur” at the lectern. The stench, he said, had been left by President Bush, who had spoken the day before, and was “the Devil.” (Chávez has a repertoire of colorful labels for Bush, including “coward,” “donkey,” “drunkard,” and “Mr. Danger.”) At a summit meeting in Chile last November, Chávez repeatedly interrupted Spain’s Prime Minister, until Juan Carlos, Spain’s king, snapped, “¿Porque no te callas?”—“Why don’t you shut up?” The King’s rebuke became an instant YouTube sensation. In Spain alone, more than half a million people downloaded it as a cell-phone ring tone.

Chávez, sitting at the stage desk, drew a diagram on a large white card, and, holding it up to the “Aló Presidente” cameras, told viewers that he’d been thinking about a new “windfall profits” tax on oil companies. He called out to Rafael Ramírez, the president of P.D.V.S.A.—a tall, blue-eyed man who resembles Tim Robbins—and he promptly stood up and began taking notes, nodding furiously. This was not a rehearsed moment; to an unusual degree, “Aló Presidente” is Chávez’s government in action, and it is a government that Chávez does not so much administer as perform live. A couple of Chávez’s younger advisers told me that they frequently felt like supporting actors in Venezuela’s own “Truman Show.”

The show went on for five hours. At one point, Chávez spoke darkly about an assassination plot against him involving Colombian and American agents. He blamed Venezuela’s private companies for shortages of food—milk, for instance, had become extremely scarce. Chávez informed his audience that, a few hours earlier, a cargo of powdered milk from Belarus had been unloaded at a Venezuelan port. He elicited a round of applause, as if the mere fact of the milk’s arrival were a feat worth saluting, and pointed out a delegation of Belarusian officials in the audience. Chávez talks incessantly about building an alliance of nations that can challenge the United States; he has sought out relationships with Iran (and had earlier sought one with Saddam Hussein), China, Russia (Chávez has called Putin one of his “buenos amigos”), and, of course, Belarus.

The show cut away by satellite to a group of Belarusians and Venezuelans at the site of a joint seismic-mapping project. After a few minutes of pleasantries exchanged through an interpreter, Chávez remarked, “That translator, from the sound of things, is Cuban, for sure.” He smiled. “Cuba all over the place!”

Then Chávez turned to the camera and, looking directly at it, asked, in English, “How are you, Fidel?”

Fidel Castro, who will turn eighty-two this summer, has been sick since July, 2006, when he vanished from view after returning from a trip to Argentina with Chávez. Despite rumors that he had cancer, it appears that Castro was suffering from diverticulitis, a severe intestinal disorder, which nearly killed him, and from which he has not entirely recovered. He has not appeared in public since, but photographs and video footage have offered glimpses of a diminished man. In all this time, Chávez has been one of the few people outside Castro’s immediate family who are allowed to see him. He has taken it upon himself to visit the Old Man regularly and to cheer him up.

“For me, Fidel is like a father. Like a beacon. Fidel is, I believe, irreplaceable,” Chávez told me. “He is a giant of the twentieth century, and, just as he entered its history, he has also entered into that of the twenty-first. And there he is, even now, doing everything he can to keep on fighting what he calls the battle of ideas, until his last breath.”

The deep friendship between Chávez and Castro began well before Chávez took office. In 1979, when Chávez was a young lieutenant in the Venezuelan Army, he and other junior officers began talking about a revolution. Their plans became more serious in 1989, after the Caracazo, a three-day riot that began when the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez implemented International Monetary Fund reforms, resulting in a spike in the cost of gasoline and public transportation; the Army was called into the streets, and hundreds of civilians were shot dead. Three years later, in 1992, Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel, led a military rebellion. But he surrendered when it became clear that his men were outnumbered, and that continuing would only mean further bloodshed. (At least twenty people died.) Allowed to appear on television, he said that the coup was over, but only “por ahora”—for now. The bombast, and the implicit threat of Chávez’s words, captivated Venezuelans, and launched his political career.

Chávez was imprisoned, along with his co-conspirators. They were released two years later, in 1994, after Pérez was impeached for corruption, and the criminal charges against them were dismissed. One of the first things Chávez did was go to Havana and meet Fidel Castro. Castro received him warmly, and treated him like a head of state. When, five years later, Chávez came to power, he returned to Havana and paid his respects to Castro.

Chávez told me that while he was in jail he had read an interview with Castro that impressed him deeply. At the time, the Cuban economy had all but collapsed, owing to the abrupt end of Soviet subsidies. “Fidel said, ‘There will be a new wave, sooner or later. The people of Latin America will awaken and there will be a new wave, and it will have to be seen,’ ” Chávez said. “Now, as for the new wave, it’s here”—he slapped the arm of his chair—“and if someone can’t see it, it’s because he’s blind, and if he can’t feel it, it’s because he’s dead.”

Since 2001, Cuba has received shipments of subsidized Venezuelan oil, estimated to be worth $2.5 billion a year, in exchange for the services of thousands of Cuban teachers, sports instructors, and doctors, who work in Venezuela’s slums and rural areas. Thousands of Venezuelans are studying in Cuba, and more than a hundred thousand Venezuelans with eye problems have been sent to Cuba for specialized medical treatment. In 2004, Chávez and Castro signed a sweeping trade deal that eliminated tariffs between their countries, and simultaneously committed themselves to Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, or ALBA, which means “dawn” in Spanish. ALBA is intended to counter the “neoliberal” trading bloc envisaged under the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas. (Bolivia, Nicaragua, and the small Caribbean island nation of Dominica have since joined ALBA.) Chávez has become Cuba’s primary benefactor while positioning himself as the inheritor of Fidel’s mantle.

In February, Castro released a letter saying that he was giving up his post as Cuba’s President. “Fidel hasn’t resigned from anything,” Chávez, loyally, told reporters. “He’s just stepped aside for others.” (Fidel’s younger brother Raúl replaced him as President.) Chávez promised to “continue fighting” at Fidel’s side.

Teodoro Petkoff, who ran against Chávez in the 2006 Presidential election campaign and is one of his leading critics on the center-left, told me that Castro had been “a moderating influence” on Chávez—a source for level-headed and pragmatic consultation for the younger man. He thought that Castro’s departure from active politics had, in that sense, hurt Chávez. “Chávez doesn’t have anyone to talk to, and there’s no one who can argue with him; the people around him are all mediocre personalities,” he told me. “The relationship with Fidel is key, because Chávez has a kind of adolescent devotion to him.”

I was reminded of something that Román Ortiz, a security-affairs analyst with a Bogotá think tank, told me: “Chávez and his plans don’t fit into the minds of those who read and believed in Fukuyama and thought we were all going to be liberals. They don’t really grasp that he has a political project, one that shares certain elements with the FARC, which is to rebuild Gran Colombia.” Ortiz added, “He will have to be contained in order for war to be avoided. Chávez is more dangerous and unpredictable than Fidel Castro. In this scenario, we are going to miss Castro.”

The nature of Chávez’s relationship with the FARC, which has been fighting to overthrow the Colombian government for more than forty years, is one of the most controversial questions about him. The FARC occupies large areas of the remote jungle of southern and eastern Colombia and finances itself by taxing illicit coca farmers and cocaine processors and traffickers. Chávez’s perceived support of the guerrillas has alienated even some of his natural allies and, since last year, has been the focus of a dispute between him and his Colombian counterpart, Álvaro Uribe, that has taken on increasingly bizarre dimensions.

Last August, Uribe asked for Chávez’s help in negotiating with the FARC for the release of hostages, some of whom have been held for as long as a decade. Chávez agreed. Then, in late November, Uribe, after learning that Chávez had spoken with the commander of the Colombian Army without first asking his permission, abruptly cut Chávez out. Chávez responded, in one tirade after another, by calling Uribe a “mafia boss,” a “coward,” and a “liar.”

Uribe does have a problematic background. In a 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document, he is described as being a “close personal friend of Pablo Escobar,” the late drug lord. As a regional governor, Uribe helped establish a civilian vigilante organization, CONVIVIR, that metamorphosed into an armed paramilitary network. Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary forces have fought a vicious war against the country’s leftist guerrillas and their sympathizers, killing thousands of civilians. And, like the FARC, they became involved in the drug trade. In the complex web of relationships that characterize Colombian society, however, few politicians can claim never to have had a relationship with a narcotraficante, a guerrilla commander, or a paramilitary warlord. During the past five years, thousands of paramilitaries have given up their weapons in a demobilization deal that has been criticized by human-rights groups as amounting to amnesty, but Uribe has been unwilling to broker a similar deal with the FARC. In the early nineteen-nineties, his father was killed during an attempt by the FARC to kidnap him.

In his attacks on Uribe, Chávez also claimed that the United States was using Colombia as a staging ground to plot his overthrow and assassination. In response, a senior U.S. diplomat in Caracas told me, “The things President Chávez accuses the United States of are just implausible. The United States has three citizens in the FARC’s hands in Colombia. We, in fact, supported President Chávez’s initial role as an arbitrator.”

Chávez continued to negotiate with the FARC on his own, and, in mid-January, he secured the release of two women. One of them, Clara Rojas, had been the campaign manager for Ingrid Betancourt, who was kidnapped in 2002 while running for President, and is the best known of the hostages. The episode had all the melodrama of a telenovela, as Rojas was reunited with her three-year-old son, Emmanuel, to whom she had given birth in the jungle, and whose father was a FARC guerrilla. Her captors had taken Emmanuel from her, and he had ended up in an orphanage. The women told of hostages being held in inhumane conditions—some were kept chained to trees. Chávez, however, chose that moment to urge Colombia to recognize the FARC as a “belligerent party,” which would give it diplomatic legitimacy, and to call on foreign governments to stop listing it as a terrorist organization. Chávez’s statements left him isolated. In February, some four million Colombians demonstrated to repudiate the FARC; many were also critical of Chávez.

Gustavo Petro is an outspoken leftist Colombian senator who is well known for his opposition to Uribe, but last year he publicly condemned the FARC for its drug trafficking and its human-rights abuses. He attributed Chávez’s position to naïveté. “The FARC has latched on to Chávez and his good will because it is in need of political varnish,” he told me. “It behaves like an occupation force, and has abandoned attempts to win over a base of support among the civilians. It actually kills more indigenous Colombians than any other armed group in the country today. Chávez doesn’t accept any of this. He is a romantic. If he sees people he thinks are ‘revolutionaries,’ Chávez salutes them and says, ‘At your service!’ ”

In official circles in Caracas, I found a near-total disconnect with the mood in Colombia. Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Nicolás Maduro, dismissed the public’s support for Uribe as the product of “a media dictatorship, with the means of communication in the hands of the most rancid, racist, retrograde oligarchy on the continent.”

A few hours after I spoke to Maduro, I was summoned to meet Venezuela’s reclusive Interior Minister, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, a former naval captain. He was a participant in Chávez’s abortive coup, and, like him, served two years in prison. More recently, Rodríguez Chacín has been Chávez’s personal emissary to the FARC. It was widely noted in Colombia that, in television coverage of a recent hostage release, he hugged the guerrillas and urged them to “keep up the struggle.”

I met Rodríguez Chacín at night in a remote part of Fuerte Tiuna, the Venezuelan Army’s headquarters, in the mountains on the outskirts of Caracas. A small man in jeans and a red windbreaker, with a stubbly shaved head, he was waiting in a large, bunkerlike room. There were piles of military gear, a desk with half a dozen telephones on it, an exercise bike, and a cot. On a low table I saw the “Selected Works of V. I. Lenin” and “The Diary of a Snail,” by Günter Grass.

We went outside to talk. The lights of the city appeared far below us like stars in an upside-down sky. Periodically, bursts of automatic gunfire could be heard. Rodríguez Chacín said that a military firing range was situated on the side of the mountain. “Sometimes they miss, so it’s unwise to go too near the edge when they’re shooting.”

He told me that he was negotiating the release of four more Colombian hostages—members of parliament who had been kidnapped six years earlier. The FARC was to bring them to a rendezvous point in the jungle; he alone would be informed of the exact location, he said. He was just waiting for the word. (The hostages were in fact released, four days later.) Rodríguez Chacín said that the FARC wanted peace, “but a different kind of peace from what Colombia’s oligarchy has in mind.” Colombia, he said, was the United States’ ”last bastion, practically the last secure beachhead it has in Latin America. So the real enemy, behind this whole circumstance, even more so than the Colombian oligarchy, is the Empire.” (In Bolivarian Venezuela, “the Empire” is the United States.)

At the entrance to a grimy traffic tunnel in downtown Caracas stands a statue of Simón Bolívar. One day, I saw a handwritten sign there, reminiscent of the revelatory messages on placards sometimes seen in front of the White House. It carried an admonition, in Spanish, saying, “Barack Obama will be the Beast, and the last President of the United States.”

The apocalyptic message was somehow fitting. Caracas is, in many respects, a failed city, and it looks and feels like a place that has spun out of control. The crime rate is shockingly high; there were an estimated five hundred and fifty murders in the first three months of this year. Indigents live openly in the public parks and along the embankments of the city’s sewage trough of a river, the Guaire. Here and there are skyscrapers built in the boom years of the sixties and seventies, their concrete carcasses discolored and crumbling. Hundreds of thousands of shanties scar the surrounding green mountains. Garbage lies uncollected, and the streets are choked with traffic—and, since Venezuela is flush with oil money, there are brand-new cars everywhere. Four hundred and fifty thousand new vehicles were sold last year. Wealthy Venezuelans, meanwhile, live in gated communities and secure apartment buildings on hilltops with panoramic views over Caracas; a nouveau-riche class has emerged from the official ranks and is known, disparagingly, as the boliburguesia, for Bolivarian bourgeoisie.

Five years ago, Chávez took direct control of the state oil company, P.D.V.S.A., after sitting out a two-month strike by its union. He fired more than eighteen thousand employees, replacing many of them with his supporters. Since then, he has used P.D.V.S.A.’s revenues to fund his most revolutionary schemes, which include the so-called missions to Venezuela’s poor. Rafael Ramírez, the P.D.V.S.A. chief, told me that Chávez intended to use P.D.V.S.A. as the vehicle for transforming Venezuela from an “oil sultanate to a productive society within a socialist framework.” Like a state within a state, the oil company has begun to replicate or supersede many of the functions of the national government. New P.D.V.S.A. branches oversee everything from agriculture to shipping, construction, and food distribution. “The plan is to make P.D.V.S.A. like Gazprom,” Ramírez told me, referring to the Russian energy giant, “but with a social role.”

Venezuela has a complex and volatile economy, with rampant corruption and high rates of unemployment and oil-fuelled inflation. A prominent Venezuelan economist, Orlando Ochoa, blamed Chávez’s policies and the inefficiency of his government for many of these problems. He described the situation to me as a “perfect economic storm.” He said, “No price of oil can forestall the rate of inflation and its social consequences.” But Ochoa acknowledged that, as long as oil prices remained high, the government could probably stave off collapse indefinitely.

Chávez’s current term ends in 2013. Last year, he held a referendum to amend the constitution and remove provisions that would prevent him from running for a third term. He let it be known that he would like to stay in power until 2050, when he would be ninety-six years old. The referendum was narrowly defeated; it was his first loss at the polls since becoming President, and it reinvigorated the political opposition.

Petkoff, who campaigned against Chávez in 2006, told me, “Chávez is a charismatic leader, and he understood that the result of the referendum meant that his popularity with the people had been somewhat eroded. He needed to find a way to reconnect more directly with the people, and so he has turned everything into a kind of personal ‘They’re coming for me’ drama.” Petkoff added, “Chávez is bipolar, really. One side of his brain is Girondin, and the other is Jacobin. He is prudent, and he is also radical.”

Petkoff’s wife, a psychologist, who was listening to us, demurred: “He’s a psychopath, in my opinion.”

Petkoff replied, “Yes, maybe, but a psychopath with a mission.”

José Vicente Rangel, who served as Chávez’s Vice-President from 2002 until 2007, said he thought that Chávez’s “infatuation” with foreign affairs and his neglect of Venezuela’s domestic problems had contributed to the referendum’s defeat. “Public insecurity is the scourge of Venezuelans, but Chávez never comprehended it,” Rangel said. “He sees the crime rate as a product of poverty, a social issue, and this is because he believes in a mythology of poverty in which all the poor are good, and it just isn’t that way; the poor are criminals, too.” Rangel said that the rebuke to his government was something Chávez took seriously—“He’s in a period of deep reflection.” The loss had shattered Chávez’s “myth of invincibility,” Rangel said, “and that has damaged us.”

In the early hours of March 1st, two days after the release of the four parliamentarian hostages, Colombian troops crossed into Ecuadoran territory and destroyed a FARC camp there. The FARC’s second-in-command, Raúl Reyes, was killed, along with twenty-four others. Uribe telephoned Ecuador’s President, Rafael Correa, to apologize for the incursion, but said that it had been done in self-defense—FARC fighters had fired on Colombian troops from the Ecuadoran side of the border.

On the next day’s “Aló Presidente,” which was broadcast from a plaza in Caracas, Chávez referred angrily to the “cowardly murder” of Reyes, whom he called a “good revolutionary,” and he said that the incident could be “the start of a war in South America.” Looking straight into the cameras, he added, “Try that here, President Uribe, and I will send you some Sukhois!” (Venezuela recently bought twenty-four Sukhoi fighter jets from Russia.)

Then Chávez turned to his Defense Minister, General Rangel, who was in the audience. Rangel stood up and snapped to attention. “Mr. Defense Minister, send ten battalions to the border with Colombia immediately,” Chávez said. “Tank battalions.”

In ordering the movement of troops on live TV, Chávez reinforced the unconventional aspect of his Presidency, in which statecraft is also a reality show. He then told viewers that he was closing the Venezuelan Embassy in Bogotá.

The next day, the chief of Colombia’s national police, General Oscar Naranjo, announced that three laptops and several hard drives had been seized during the raid on the FARC camp. According to General Naranjo, e-mail exchanges found on Reyes’s computer indicated that Chávez had offered the FARC three hundred million dollars; one e-mail message, allegedly from a FARC official, suggested that Rodríguez Chacín had asked the FARC to help train Venezuelans in “guerrilla warfare.” (There were also murky references to an attempt by the FARC to buy uranium for a “dirty bomb,” although these seemed less credible.)

Chávez dismissed the e-mails as fabrications. Uribe said that he intended to seek an indictment against Chávez before the International Criminal Court, for what he called “the patronage and financing of genocidists.” Uribe’s approval ratings soared to eighty-four per cent, while Chávez was viewed unfavorably by ninety per cent of Colombians.

Suddenly, there was talk of regional war. Television broadcasts showed Venezuelan tanks moving toward Colombia’s borders; trade between the two countries ground to a halt, and diplomats were expelled. One Latin-American diplomat told me he feared that the situation could easily escalate into a larger armed conflict. “Chávez is using this incident to divert public attention from his internal problems,” he said. “And I think he is also trying to demonstrate that he is the leader of the region’s popular forces. It is a very risky calculation.”

A few days after Chávez ordered his tanks to the Colombian border, I interviewed him at Miraflores, the Presidential palace. We sat under a large portrait of Simón Bolívar. Chávez was wearing black jeans, a green military jacket, and a red T-shirt. The next day, he was to fly to Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, where some twenty Latin-American leaders were gathering for a summit, which would address the crisis. He intended to confront Uribe there.

I asked Chávez if his dispute with Colombia was getting out of hand. He replied, “If you look at the situation clearly, the reality is that you have an anti-imperialist revolutionary country here and, over there, a counterrevolutionary, pro-imperialist country. It’s an explosive contradiction.” Over the years, he said, he had mostly managed to maintain good relations with Uribe. He mentioned a dispute involving a FARC emissary kidnapped in Caracas at the direction of Colombian agents. On that occasion, Chávez had been about to break off diplomatic relations when Uribe asked Fidel Castro to intercede. “Fidel called me, and so we found a solution,” Chávez said.

“All this garbage is going to come back and fall on Uribe himself,” he said. “First of all, just to clarify, the mobilization of troops on the border, that’s all defensive—eminently defensive. Because we are faced with a government, the Colombian government, that has publicly assumed the Bush doctrine—preventive war, preëmptive attack.”

He expressed understanding for the FARC. When, during a ceasefire in the mid-eighties, the FARC established a political party, thousands of its members were murdered, Chávez said. He said that he couldn’t “dismiss the possibility that a group of guerrillas can cross the border—ours with Colombia is more than two thousand kilometres long—and install themselves, as occurred with Ecuador, here.” He went on, “Anyone would understand that I was obliged to reinforce the border. I had to warn Uribe that he should not dare to do here in Venezuela what he did in Ecuador.”

As for Uribe’s accusations and his threat to bring him before the International Criminal Court, “I laugh at them—they are risible.” Uribe was the one who should be investigated for genocide, Chávez said. “There are documents detailing the massacres by the paramilitaries in Colombia. It’s a horrible thing. They burn people, they cut them into pieces—into pieces! And Uribe supported that.” He added, “Uribe says I will be accused? Well, to paraphrase Fidel, who once said that history will absolve him, history has already condemned Álvaro Uribe.”

I asked Chávez if he believed that a confrontation with the United States was inevitable.

“Look, once, when I was a boy, I nearly drowned in a river,” Chávez said. “The current took me. Friends saved me when I was swept into a rock. Imagine if I had not been saved, and I had drowned at fifteen. This would have happened anyway. . . . If the oligarchies of this continent, directed by the United States and that group of extreme right-wing fascists with their imperial strategies of war who are in the White House, try to stop this revolution, Latin America will go up in flames.”

Chávez said that it was not his intention, as some said, “to be the leader of a continental revolution. Nor do we plan to export the Bolivarian revolution. It is a process that is happening—it is the people who are doing it. . . . Now, does this project necessarily have to confront the United States?” He paused. “I would say yes—not the United States as such but the imperial line of the United States. Confrontation is inevitable.”

Chávez’s jet took off for the Dominican Republic the next afternoon—“Hola, guerrilleros!” he called out to his Cuban doctors as we boarded. Maduro, the Foreign Minister, said, smiling, “Let’s go confront the Empire.”

The summit began the next morning, in a convention center set among the resort hotels and casinos on Santo Domingo’s seafront. At Chávez’s suggestion, I was given a lapel pin identifying me as a member of the Venezuelan delegation so that I could get into the Presidents’ session, which was closed to the press. President Uribe, a pale, small, trim-looking man, was the first head of state to enter the hall, followed by Chávez and Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s President. Ortega wore a suède jacket and jeans; all the other leaders, including Chávez, wore suits. (Ortega, the former Sandinista leader, was reëlected President last year, in spite of an unending series of scandals, and has begun to restore his image, thanks in part to Chávez’s financial and political largesse.) Chávez and Uribe ignored one another.

The Dominican President, Leonel Fernández, opened the meeting and gave Rafael Correa, of Ecuador, the floor. “The government of Colombia bombed my country,” Correa began. Ecuador, he said, was prepared to pursue its grievances to their “final consequences.” Looking at Uribe, Correa said, “Your insolence offends us even more than your murderous bombs.”

Chávez and the rest of the Venezuelan delegation gave Correa a standing ovation.

Uribe spoke next. He described Raúl Reyes, the FARC leader killed in the raid, as “one of the most frightening terrorists in the history of humanity.” (A Chávez adviser next to me rolled his eyes.) He conceded that his troops had bombed the camp in Ecuador—but said that the bombs had been launched from Colombian territory. As for the guerrillas who were killed, “they weren’t there preparing for Easter festivities.”

At one point, Daniel Ortega got up, walked behind Correa, and stared hard at Uribe, looking like a man spoiling for a fight. When Uribe suggested that he sit down, Ortega said, “I am not your son! Who do you think you are?” After a while, he sauntered back to his seat.

Following Uribe’s remarks, Correa said that Uribe would bomb the Dominican Republic if he suspected that it harbored another Raúl Reyes.

“Don’t inflict on me the cynicism of those who are nostalgic for Communism,” Uribe interrupted.

Correa, continuing, raised his arms. “These hands are clean and free of blood.”

The session seemed close to breaking down. Then Chávez spoke. He began by telling stories, goading the others and drawing them in. In the nineties, he said, he had been accused of giving arms to Bolivia’s President, Evo Morales, who was then a cocalero activist and a congressman, and to another indigenous Bolivian leader, Felipe Quispe. Chávez said to Morales, “Evo—I think Quispe’s even more radical than you.” Morales smiled modestly.

Chávez said he found ironic the accusation that he was providing three hundred million dollars to the FARC, since he had recently financed a three-hundred-million-dollar gas pipeline for Colombia—he and Uribe had attended the groundbreaking together. Chávez looked across at Cristina Kirchner, the President of Argentina, whose populist, left-of-center government is supportive of his. “Witness the infamy that was invented that I had sent suitcases full of dollars to Cristina.” (Last August, a Venezuelan-American businessman travelling to Buenos Aires was found to be carrying eight hundred thousand dollars in undeclared cash in his suitcase. Although Chávez has denied it, the widespread assumption is that he was secretly financing Kirchner’s Presidential campaign.) “And now it’s suitcases in the jungle!”

By now, many of the leaders were laughing. Chávez had created an atmosphere of entente cordiale, and momentarily blunted Uribe’s charges against him. “I could have sent plenty of rifles to the FARC,” Chávez said. “I could have sent them plenty of dollars—I will not do it, ever.”

Chávez then had a surprise: the FARC, he said, had just informed him that it was prepared to release six more hostages. Uribe spoke in urgent whispers with his aides. Chávez asked President Fernández if protocol could be broken to allow the mother of Ingrid Betancourt to come into the hall. After some commotion, Betancourt’s mother, Yolanda Pulecio, an elegant woman in her late sixties (and a former Miss Colombia), entered. With her was Piedad Córdoba, a flamboyant left-wing Colombian senator who has worked with Chávez in negotiations with the FARC, and who was wearing a white turban. Uribe looked furious; Chávez was showing that he, not Uribe, was the one who could save the hostages’ lives.

By now, some eight hours had gone by, and waiters brought the leaders plates of food while they talked. Finally, an agreement was worked out, as part of which Uribe promised, reluctantly, not to conduct new cross-border raids. Fernández asked Uribe and Correa to embrace. After some hesitation, they shook hands. Chávez walked up to Uribe and greeted him, too, and the crisis seemed to be at an end. Then, moments later, Correa began berating Uribe, who bristled. The other leaders in the room looked alarmed. Chávez swiftly spoke in mollifying tones to Uribe, who relaxed.

I walked out with Piedad Córdoba and Yolanda Pulecio. Córdoba was gleeful. She said that she and Chávez and Cristina Kirchner had planned everything in detail—the revelation about the new hostages, and Pulecio’s dramatic appearance.

Chávez had shown himself capable of sparking a regional confrontation and then, by defusing it, appearing as the peacemaker. It was similar to the moment in 1992 when he called off his coup attempt. Uribe understood that he had been temporarily outmaneuvered, and had responded to Chávez’s gesture. Both leaders, to an extent, could declare victory, although it was clear that this was just a skirmish in an ongoing conflict.

We were boarding the flight that was to take us back to Caracas when Chávez announced that he had changed his mind: the plane was going to Cuba instead. A wave of elation swept through the delegation. When we arrived in Havana, it was nearly midnight. Raúl Castro, wearing a military uniform, a brimmed hat, and large glasses, which gave him an owlish appearance, was waiting to greet Chávez as he got off the plane. Chávez was exuberant, and called me over to introduce me to Raúl, who looked me up and down with a cautious smile and shook my hand. As the rest of the delegation headed to a state-run hotel, Chávez disappeared with Raúl.

The next day, Raúl saw Chávez off at the airport. As we taxied away, Chávez came to the rear of the plane. He was beaming. He had spent three hours with Fidel, who was “just fine.” He added, “Fidel asked me to say hello to all of you for him!”

Afterward, a senior Latin-American diplomat told me he learned that Chávez had lowered the tension with Uribe at the summit “because Fidel advised him to.”

In mid-May, the Interpol team investigating the captured FARC laptops announced that the hard drives had not been tampered with since their discovery. The investigators cautioned that they did not verify the authorship or the accuracy of the e-mails, but the report was damning. Chávez responded by deriding the investigators, calling Interpol’s secretary general, an American, an “international vagabond.”

Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon said that he was “surprised” at Chávez’s flippant reaction. Two days after the release of the report, on May 17th, a U.S. Navy jet strayed into Venezuelan airspace, owing to what the Pentagon said was a navigation error. Defense Minister Rangel called the incident a “provocation.”

A series of embarrassments and setbacks for Chávez followed. A decree law, intended to bolster the country’s intelligence in case of “imperialist attacks,” passed on May 28th and came under immediate and widespread criticism; many Venezuelans feared that it would require them to inform on one another. Ten days later, on June 7th, the Colombian government announced the arrest of a Venezuelan officer whom they accused of smuggling forty thousand AK-47 bullets to the FARC. Chávez’s government said that it was investigating. Adding to the sense of disarray, the FARC was forced to confirm reports that its legendary leader, Manuel Marulanda, had died of a heart attack.

Chávez seemed to realize that he had gone too far. The day of the smuggling arrest, he announced that he would suspend the new intelligence law, saying, “There is no dictatorship here.” Then, on his June 8th “Aló Presidente” broadcast, he unexpectedly called on the FARC to give up its armed struggle and let its hostages go, saying that guerrillas did not have a place in today’s world. Chávez appeared—for now—to be withdrawing from the battlefield he had helped to create, pragmatically cutting his losses. Above all, he had shown the strength of his instincts as a survivor.

Whether his call to the FARC was more than a tactical ploy remains to be seen. “Those were very useful words,” Assistant Secretary Shannon said at a talk in Miami. “That does not mean we aren’t aware of what is happening, and the kind of relationship that has been built over time between some members of the Venezuelan government and the FARC.” The question is, Shannon said, will the Venezuelan government “use that relationship in an effort to get the FARC to come in out of the cold and end a four-decade conflict? Or will it continue to conspire against a democratic neighbor? . . . That, I think, is what everybody in the region is waiting for: how Venezuela will define itself.”

Bill Richardson said that, in April, he had travelled to Caracas to speak to Chávez on behalf of the families of three American defense contractors being held by the FARC. Chávez had been effusive and friendly—Richardson is Mexican-American, and they spoke for an hour and a half in Spanish. He told Richardson that he did not comprehend the Bush Administration’s hostility toward him: “He told me he didn’t like being demonized.” When Richardson asked him if he would get in touch with the FARC about the American contractors, Chávez said, “Sí, te ayudo”—“Yes, I will help you.” Richardson said, “We need to establish some lines of communication with him, and this—coöperation on the hostage negotiations—is a possible way to start. I think we should keep a stable relationship with Venezuela; it’s in our interest to do so.”

On June 7th, Chávez had also said, “Whoever is the next President of the United States, I’d like to start preparing the way to start working together.” When I asked Ana Navarro, an adviser to Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, about the offer, she said, “Senator McCain thinks that Chávez is a charlatan and a thug. The Senator doesn’t trust Chávez, and does not think it worth getting into a back-and-forth with him.” Last year, Senator Barack Obama was asked in a debate if he would be willing to meet with leaders who are hostile to the United States—Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Chávez, and Castro—“without precondition.” Obama answered that he would, prompting Senators McCain and Hillary Clinton to suggest that he was naïve. Obama subsequently said that high on his agenda in any talks with Chávez would be addressing “the fomentation of anti-American sentiment in Latin America,” and “his support of the FARC in Colombia,” which, he said, was “not acceptable.”

I asked Richardson if he had carried a message to Chávez on behalf of Senator Obama, whose candidacy he endorsed after dropping out of the Presidential race himself. Richardson said that he hadn’t, but that the thought had seemed to occur to Chávez, too. “He said that he had noticed my endorsement. And he said, ‘We could use better treatment from the United States.’ But I don’t think he sees me as a representative of Obama, but as a fellow Latin-American,” Richardson said. “His message to me was ‘Take me seriously, and treat me better.’ ” ♦

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998.